PUBLISHER SAYS TURKISH WRITER ORHAN PAMUK COULD FACE PRISON FOR INSULTING NATIONAL CHARACTER
By Benjamin Harvey
The Associated Press
08/31/05 12:07 EDT
ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) – One of Turkey’s best-known novelists has been
charged with insulting Turkey’s national character and could be facing
prison, his publisher said Wednesday.
Orhan Pamuk is scheduled to go on trial on Dec. 16 and could face up
to three years in prison for comments on Turkey’s killing of Armenians
and Kurds, publisher Tugrul Pasaoglu said.
Turkish court officials were not immediately available to comment.
“Thirty-thousand Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these
lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it,” Pamuk was quoted as
saying in an interview with a Swiss newspaper magazine in February.
The “one million Armenians” refers to Armenians killed by Ottoman
Turks around the time of World War I, which Armenians and several
nations around the world recognize as the first genocide of the
twentieth century.
Turkey vehemently denies that an Armenian genocide took place, saying
the death toll is inflated and Armenians were killed in a civil war
as the Ottoman Empire collapsed, eventually giving way to the Turkish
Republic in 1923.
The “thirty thousand Kurds” mentioned by Pamuk refers to those killed
since 1984 as Turkey fought a vicious war against armed Kurdish
separatists. The fighting paused in 1999 after a cease-fire was called
by the rebels, but has resumed since then.
Turkey, along with the United States and the European Union, considers
members of the main rebel group – the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or
PKK – terrorists.
Turkey, which has been trying to improve its human rights record as
it vies for membership in the European Union, is extremely sensitive
about both the Armenian and Kurdish issues, and the new Turkish penal
code makes it a crime to denigrate Turkey’s national identity.
As the code was being debated earlier this year, freedom of speech
advocates said that the clause on national identity was too vague and
could lead to the imprisonment of artists, scholars and journalists.
Pamuk’s books, which include the internationally acclaimed “Snow”
and “My Name is Red,” have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Pamuk lives in Istanbul. His publisher said that the writer does
not go out much and was not readily available for comment. He said,
however, that Pamuk is determined to answer his charges in court.
The new penal code restricts the rights of parties to discuss an
ongoing case.
“We have to wait for the court. Then he (Pamuk) will make his speech
in the court,” Pasaoglu said.
Many of Pamuk’s books deal with Turkish identity, a complex mixture
of Western European, Oriental and Islamic values. Pamuk has not shied
away from dealing with Turkey’s more controversial historical issues,
and the author has become a magnet of criticism for his statements.